The Crime Museum Uncovered: Tackling a Difficult History

“It was colonel mustard in the study with the candlestick” – crime is an embedded part of modern society. Not a day goes by when the news doesn’t report  a crime of some description, or a video game is released that allows players to steal cars (or worse), or thousands sit down to watch a peak time televised crime drama. It surrounds us and in many ways we’ve become somewhat desensitised to it as a society. Or at least that’s what I’d have previously argued until a visit to The Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition at the Museum of London a few months ago called that view into question. Unfortunately the exhibition has now ended but it raised some interesting questions for me about the challenges faced when putting an exhibition together.

Prior to the launch of this exhibition I had never heard of the Crime Museum and it would never have occurred to me that Scotland Yard would have their own museum and an artefact collection used for the training of new recruits. It’s not the usual function you associate with a museum is it really, although it feels somewhat obvious now it has been pointed out. Anyway, back in February we decided we’d visit and I have to say the very subject of the exhibition made me a little apprehensive about visiting. Crime. It is one thing to indulge in an episode of Criminal Minds or Shetland once a week, but it is something completely different to be physically confronted with remnants of crime; items once belonging to victims or perpetrators - murder weapons, newspaper reports and execution materials- the list goes on. The mind boggles around the ethical implications behind this exhibition, but my experience of Museum of London exhibitions has always been good and I was certainly intrigued to see what it had to offer on this occasion.

Free Museum Guide

The sheer popularity of this exhibition has been staggering; I was certainly not alone in my curiosity. And my first impressions were good, although I couldn’t decide if their choice of museum guide (a newspaper style document with headlines matching displays and giving descriptions of items within cases) was pure genius or downright distasteful. I’m still undecided, but then again the whole exhibition tapped into this idea that something so macabre can at the same time be so captivating – there is something quite disturbing to be said there about human nature when you think about it.

Anyway, back to the exhibition which was divided into three main sections. The first was mainly about the history of Crime Museum alongside some items from its collections. This included illustrations, a visitor book and museum catalogue, as well as death masks and prison records, which included mugshots. However, the items that still stick out for me from this section were the execution ropes in a case as you moved towards the second section of the exhibition. You were told about the individual who was hung from each rope and their crime, however, rather than recoil, I was left questioning how they could possibly know it was those exact ropes? I think if curators are going to make a claim like that it needs more explaining. Was it because records show which execution boxes (shown later on in the exhibition) are used for which cases in some sort of register, as we theorised? If that’s the case then that needed to be made clearer. Explain processes, especially if it is as something as simple as that, because our questioning took away from the impact those items had on us as visitors. And this also demonstrates what I mean about being desensitised to this sort of information, I was hung up on validity of evidence rather than the fact this rope had in part been responsible for taking someone’s life.

The second section of the exhibition broke into a large area, with specific case studies across the time span covered located down one side of the exhibition room, while along the other ,and at islands platforms in the centre, a more thematic approach was taken by showing a specific type of crime. For each case study the year was given, the offenders and their charge listed, and their victims named. Some crimes you knew, some you didn’t, but at this stage you really got a sense of the human story – of both the victim and of the perpetrator – that lay behind the exhibition.

Finally, at the end of the exhibition there was a room for reflection. A chance for you as a visitor to decompress on what you’d just seen but also to hear from those involved with the curation of the exhibition – their intentions, hopes and considerations in compiling, what was both a confronting and thought provoking exhibition. I was particularly struck by two comments made in the videos. The first was by one of the curators who said that ‘Museums shouldn’t be afraid to confront the uncomfortable’ and I couldn’t agree more. I also think the exhibition has been successful in doing this and has shown how it can be made possible. The second comment, and unfortunately I can’t exactly remember who made it, was that ‘Everyone is somebody to someone’ - a reflection on the ethical complications of putting this exhibition together. I still think it had been well done. It wasn’t overly emotional, nor was it cold and clinical. It’s taken a complicated history in which a number of groups, families and individuals are invested and presented it in such a way that visitors left not only knowing about particular crimes, but also about the history of policing and crime solving.

This is a poorly timed blog as the exhibition closed back in April but I just thought I would share my reflections on what was an unusually captivating exhibition by the Museum of London.

Telegrams and Tools – Discovering the stories of family through objects.

By Ellen O'Brien - “PhD student, book lover and tea addict, I spend my days researching and writing, with help from my bunny George. History is not quite so visible in Australia as in England… but it's there if you know where to look!”

I sat for a moment in her chair, and let the dust settle. It was cool in the house, but out in the shed I could hear Mum and Tom wrestling with four decades of accumulated dust and debris. I wondered if Rose was somewhere nearby, watching us dismantle her home of fifty years? Sitting in the silence of the front room– it still retained the air of pristine sanctity that she maintained all her life– I thought that perhaps she wouldn’t mind. There was nothing mercenary about our sorting through her possessions, no siblings squabbling over jewellery (her frugal life didn’t allow for any), or the irreverence of a removal company.

© Ellen O'Brien

It is interesting to consider a life through objects, don’t you think? From a scientific perspective, they reveal things about a person or society. To an archaeologist, a fragment of pottery is as a good as a page from someone’s cookbook, or a weather report! Certainly, objects have informed my own understanding of history: ancient Egypt, to me, looks like the sarcophagi in the British Museum. But on a more intimate level, they are the mementoes we have collected on our way through life and chosen to keep around us, to look at, to touch, to remember everyday. What do these objects reveal about a person, and the joys and tragedies they have experienced? When Rose died, some of her possessions had an obvious significance– others only made sense because of the stories she told. Objects can tell us so much about the recently departed, but they also invite us into the lives of an entire family and extended family. This is what I recently experienced. That week, through the objects left in Rose’s house, we were able to trace my own family’s journey, from the harsh and isolated wheatbelt town of Kellerberrin, to the fringes of Perth in the 1960s, to London in the present day.

Allow me to explain. My father and his cousin Tom grew up a mere 127 kilometres apart in the towns of Corrigin and Kellberrin– pretty close by Australian wheatbelt standards– but didn’t actually meet until the 1990s, when Tom brought his small, English children to Australia for the first time. Somewhere in the depths of our family history, lies a dispute between brothers Patrick, my grandfather, and Connor, Roses’ husband and Tom’s Dad. It was tied up with the family farm at Kellerberrin, and which of the boys would inherit… we think. Rose, for many years the only remaining witness, was renowned for her ability to talk the leg off a chair, but was always uncharacteristically tight lipped about the matter. When Tom returned to Perth with his children in the 90s, they found some ready-made playmates in my brother and I, and more importantly, that no memory of this family feud existed. Perhaps Rose did us a great favour by keeping mum all those years, for Amy and I are now the best of friends, and in that peculiar way families have, have discovered that although we live 9000-odd miles apart, we have a great many things in common.  

© Ellen O'Brien

This is how I ended up, one warm January arvo, in Rose’s shed. Chock-a-block with oilcans and newspapers from the 70s, it was there we found Connor’s old tools. Thick with rust, they were clearly straight off the farm: the average suburban gardener doesn’t have much use for a plough chisel, or a set of imperial measurement spanners. Hanging on the wall was an old horse bit attached to a decaying bridle. Green with age, Tom extricated it from its cradle of spider webs. ‘That must have been the old horse’s… they kept him at the farm after motorised tractors came in… I remember Mum talking about him.’

© Ellen O'Brien

A self-confessed bibliophile, I found that I was drawn to the bookshelf in the ‘good room.’ The ubiquitous gold-edged Reader’s Digest titles were interspersed with some more telling items: Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex, surprising, perhaps, for a staunchly Catholic widow, and a collection of medical books, Yourself and Your Body, The Home Physician and A Husband’s Guide to Marriage. Were they a throwback to Rose’s nursing days, or an effort to negotiate what was by all accounts a difficult marriage in the lonely climate of the 1950s and 60s?

© Ellen O'Brien

In spite of these difficulties, there was evidence of female friendship. We unearthed a box of telegrams received on the birth of Tom in 1956, all written on identical General Post Office baby telegram forms, decorated with balloons and a teddy bear. ‘Congratulations on the birth of a darling baby boy, Love Patrick and Marjorie,’ read one in my grandmother’s handwriting. They were both, after all, raising boys in the austere conditions of a 1950’s farming community. With undertones of shared experience and affection, the note quietly acknowledges the negotiation of family ties and the lifestyle they shared.

That first day, Tom told us about his adventures in Africa, where he met Jane, the mother of his children. The ordinance maps and 78” records in his well-preserved teenage bedroom told the story of his diploma in surveying, his fascination with Perth’s growing music scene in the 80s, and his eventual escape to Notting Hill, Africa, Europe and finally, Milton Keynes. His tiny school hat –Aquinas College– was discarded as a symbol of the religion of his parents, rejected utterly by Tom after his experiences at the prestigious but close-minded boys’ school.

© Ellen O'Brien

Wrapped in newspaper like a piece of battered cod, in a box under my own bed, is a set of art deco teacups, which I hope one day will grace the bridal tea or house-warming party of my cousin Amy, who resembles her grandmother Rose in both waif-like build and resilience of mind and opinion. Our family has come full circle, from the strife over a dusty paddock in Kellerberrin, to enduring international friendship that has bloomed through the days of letter writing, to email, to Facebook and Snapchat.

In our week in Rose’s house, I learned about history through objects. It struck me as a shame that many of the stories were lost, and all we had left were these physical fragments and our own speculations. At risk of sounding like a community public service announcement, it is so important to connect with the older members of your family.  Ask, and let and them pass you their memories with their own weathered hands. After all, the real value of an heirloom is the story attached to it. Rose’s old Singer Sewing machine, now in my own mum’s expert care, was built in Strathclyde in 1949. It’s a beautiful piece of machinery, and surprisingly still works. But where did Rose get it? Was it a gift? Did she make her wedding dress with it? Either way, we have started making new memories with it. I can tell my children how, not knowing what it was, I tried to get the lid of with a rusty screwdriver, which gave way before the lid did. Or that a few mornings ago, our friend Peter hopped down the driveway (yes, he had a broken foot) and tested the motor by grabbing the edge of the sink and sticking a spanner in the socket. Electrical engineering at its finest (ahem). What about the women in Strathclyde who worked at the Singer factory? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know what they were doing in 1949? For many, German bombs had decimated their homes just eight years previously, yet they were able to make these beautiful, intricate machines that travelled to the other side of the world. Such an unobtrusive little device, sitting quietly under its lid on the table, but what stories it could tell.